The 15 minutes woman versus the 8 hour man. Who will win?  

The one area where my husband and I have conflict is around the subject of housework. To put it simply, he doesn't do his fair share.

At some point I figured out that part of the problem is that we have very different cleaning styles. When he was living alone he would let his place get horribly messy and then spend an entire day cleaning the place from top to bottom. Whereas my method is to pick up something every time I move from room to room - if I'm going into the kitchen I'll grab the dirty glasses on the coffee table on my way by. I do 15-minute bursts of cleaing several tims a day. That way the place never gets too messy for me to stand it.

Now that we live together, those different cleaning styles are coming into conflict. It never gets messy enough to tip his "This place is a mess, I have to clean it up" button. And it never gets clean enough to stop bugging me. I'll take the glassware into the kitchen only to discover he's opened a package of something and left the discarded wrappers all over the counters. I clean up the kitchen and come back into the living room to find everything that was in his coat spread out over the coffee table. It seems like for every one of my "15-minutes" of cleaning I do, he spends twice as much time making a mess.

And when he does clean something, he leaves the bucket, sponge, mop and cleaning products right where he got done with them - in the middle of the floor.

It's starting to seriously drive me crazy. I don't mind spending hours a day to have a comfortable clean house. I RESENT doing all this work to live in a pigsty. And no matter how often we talk about it, any extra effort he makes wears off in about a week and we're back to normal.

I'm running out of ideas. How do I deal with this?